


Take on the Whole Empire Ourselves

by MalcolmInSpace



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-29
Updated: 2017-04-29
Packaged: 2018-10-25 04:02:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10756305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MalcolmInSpace/pseuds/MalcolmInSpace
Summary: With the Death Star destroyed, Luke confronts loss and finds a new relationship.





	Take on the Whole Empire Ourselves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yunmin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yunmin/gifts).



An X-Wing explodes in the Death Star’s trench, fire and debris hurls past Luke’s canopy a fraction after he hears a short, cut-off cry. Many years from now, when he is old and alone on an island amidst an endless sea, he will wake sometimes in the night and hear that cry and look up at the stars.

 

Luke is looking up at the stars.  He is on the hood of his battered, beloved old speeder on the edge of a mesa. Down is Beggar’s Canyon, up is space, beside him is Biggs Darklighter.  They are naked, lying beneath blankets spread across the speeder to protect them against the cool desert twilight. Shoulders, hips, and thighs pressed against each other, fingers entwined as they lie on their backs and trace the trails of ships in orbit, ships rising and descending to and from Mos Eisley, guessing their make and model, imagining the places they could go on those ships.

For one of them, it will soon be reality. Biggs is leaving tomorrow and this is their final night together. Tomorrow Biggs will report to the Imperial recruiting station in Toche Station, and he will be issued a cadet uniform and he will ship off for the Academy. They both know, though never discuss, that Biggs won’t stay there. They hate the Empire, though abstractly in Luke’s case. Get the training, Biggs has told him, find a way to blend in, and then run to the Rebels as soon as they can find them. And if they can’t find the Rebels, well, they’ll take on the whole Empire themselves.

Luke hears those words again on a planet as oppositely cold to Tatooine yet equally desolate, and they give him pause, a dim flicker of a warm memory.

Luke and Biggs spend their last night together quietly, each attempting to memorize the other, trying to record every detail, every sound, every feeling.  Luke wonders what Biggs will look like if he ever manages to grow the mustache he wants. Biggs wonders if Tattooine and Owen Lars will grind down the spark he sees in Luke.

In the morning, Luke sits on his airspeeder and watched the ship carrying Biggs Darklighter into the future until it has disappeared beyond the atmosphere and the dry, hungry winds of Tatooine have blown away the vapour trail.  He dries his eyes and drives away.  He has moisture vaporators to fix.  The thought of work makes him think of his uncle and for a few minutes the embers of teenage resentment are a comforting warmth against the cold.  Uncle Owen is resisting, but Luke knows they’ll need new maintenance droids in the season or two. And guess whose job it’ll be to fix them?

Luke sighs, settles his dusk mask across his face, and speeds across the desert.

 

The medal ceremony is grand, gratifying, and _noisy_.  Luke grew up in a desert, and he’d thought Mos Eisely was crowded.  There are probably more people than that whole city all packed into this one vast room, and it feels like all of them wanted to talk to Luke all at once.  At first it was thrilling, but soon the waves of noise – hundreds of voices bouncing off the high, stone walls of the temple – and the waves of emotion – joy, fear, relief, grief, anger, laughter, love – that radiate off of every person all crash down on Luke.  He can feel his shoulders tightening, his breath growing short, the pressure building up inside with every echoed laugh, every jostling of his shoulder, every body that comes between him and the door.  He looks around for someone he knows, trying to mask the rising panic inside.  People talk to him but he has trouble understanding their words so he smiled and nods and slips through the crowd.

Leia is nowhere to be seen, indeed Luke hasn’t seen her since the ceremony dissolved into the reception.  Chewie is easy to spot, head and shoulders above the crowd with Han’s medal gleaming around his neck.  Han took it off and draped it over the wookiee’s head before the applause had finished. Chewie would be a comforting wind break against the buffeting crowd, but Han has gathered a great packed cluster of Rebels to tell and retell the story of their escape from the Death Star and to Luke that throng of happy people looks like a kilometre of razor sands and angry banthas and he ducks away before he can be recognized and called into them.  He sees a few of the surviving pilots and ground crew standing just apart, speaking together and toasting to memories. He has met many of them and they seemed welcoming, but he doesn’t really know them, doesn’t know whether he is still a stranger, an interloper who came back when their friends did not. He turns away again, yearning to belong but afraid of being surrounded.

There. A door, a side passage out of the great hall.  Luke sidles toward, smiling and nodding. One Rebel trooper claps him on the shoulder and shouts a toast and it’s all Luke can do not to pull away and run. He forces a smile, nods with the words he doesn’t really hear, and waits until he can slip away.

The corridor is dark and cool, the ancient stones rebuffing the heat of the day.  Luke feels like iron bands have been lifted from his shoulders. He can hear the party, but it’s distant now.  He has never seen an ocean, doesn’t know the soothing roar of surf against shore at night, but someday he will.  He follows the corridor almost at random, fingertips trailing across the rough stone walls. Relief at the silence mixes with the familiar aching wish that he, too, could be as at ease among the noise and joy as the others. He wonders now if it is the Force, opening him to a barrage of sensation that others are blind to.

His unconscious, undirected wanderings take him through disused, poorly lit areas of the temple and then to the command areas.  He peers into rooms full of beeping, winking equipment manned by a few lonely techs and troopers.  He avoids them, too drained by the overload to exchange even simple chat with a stranger. He moves on, into places he has not seen.  Meeting rooms, chambers, these ones more formally appointed. Some bear nameplates for planets, places he’s only read about. And one that no longer exists.

Alderaan.

Luke steps to the door by some instinct and peers in.  Leia stands there, fingers resting lightly on a polished wooden table. She looks so regal in her gown, so beautiful, that Luke pauses to catch his breath. From the moment he opened her cell and fumbled through what he’d hoped would be a heroic speech he’d felt a connection to her, been impressed by her. Here, he thinks, is someone who can change the galaxy. He opens his mouth to speak, and then her shoulders clench and she lets out a single, piercing sob. Luke feels her grief like a hammer, the despair and rage and guilt all the feelings for millions of dead, a murdered world and a stolen family, that she has kept grimly locked away until the job was done.  He rocks back, riven by it, frightened by how viscerally he feels what she feels.

The far door slides open with a soft whoosh and two women enter.  One is tall, with softly greying red hair and a stately mien. The other is a green-skinned Twi’lek, with general’s pips on the collar of her flight suit. He doesn’t know either in that moment, but he feels Leia’s relief at seeing them.  They go to her, flank her. The tall woman takes Leia’s hand and the Twi’lek puts an arm about her shoulder.  They talk softly in words Luke cannot hear, and shed tears together for the dead.

Luke walks away, dazed. He is glad someone is there for Leia as she was for him as they fled from the Death Star, and guilty that he had overlooked her loss in the face of his own.

Eventually his feet take him to the pilot billets. Rows of bunks in a long room, with common space down the centre.  Luke has a bunk here, somewhere. He hasn’t used it yet, things have been such a whirlwind.  Is this to be home now?  He sits down heavily at a table and stares blankly at the ceiling. Home is a burned-out farm, or it’s a beat-up freighter, or maybe it’s here. Most of these bunks have no owner any more. Blue Squadron was gone before Luke even arrived, a story he’s not properly heard yet. Gold Squadron is down to a few. And Red Squadron.  Red Squadron is just him and-

Wedge sits down across from him, startling him out of his reverie. The other pilot is flushed, unsteady with drink and red-eyed from crying, and sets an labeled plastiglass bottle on the table – Luke knows homemade liquor when he sees it.  He glares at Luke, and Luke can feel himself drawing into himself, feeling his breath starting to race.  Then Wedge sighs, pushes the bottle across the Luke, and the tension drains out of his face.

Luke sips something that burns like a three-day sandstorm, and they sit in quiet for a moment.

“Why not me?” Wedge asks suddenly, a raw edge to his voice. Luke wonders if this is jealousy, or bitterness that Luke lived where Wedge’s friends did not, but he doesn’t feel resentment from Wedge, just grief and… “Why me and not _him_ ,” Wedge says thickly, “why couldn’t you have sent _him_ away and let me die instead?”

The question hammers at him, bringing up the grief he’d been avoiding. Luke takes another sip of the shine and feels it warming his empty belly.  “I…  don’t know. It was all happening so fast, and…”

Wedge waves a hand, takes a drink from the bottle, takes a deep breath and scrubs his hand across his raw eyes.  “I know. I know. We knew what we there to be – an extra set of shields for you, so you could take that shot. We’d already said goodbye.  I just never thought I’d be here without him.”

“You… you loved him, too,” Luke says softly.

“I did. How could I not?” He smiles faintly. “He talked about you, you know. All the time. About what an amazing pilot you are, the stunts you’d pull. He said we’d be friends, said we’d all-“

“Tale on the Empire ourselves?” Luke asks with a chuckle, and Wedge laughs, too.

They drink, and laugh, and shed tears and tell stories and grieve for the man they’d both loved. Wedge tells Luke of all the lost pilots. Of the ones who went to Scarif and didn’t return. About the ones who’d gone up with Luke and Wedge and didn’t return. About Porkins and all the rest. And they began, ever so slowly, to fall in love with each other.


End file.
